What immediately comes to mind to me is a massive home media/gaming server. As we enter the age of personal cloud gaming, I could see placing a monster gaming PC on my basement rack connected via HDMI/DP over CAT6a to all my displays or using Piston or Shield to play games anywhere in the house. Load FlexRAID on there and fill it with 22 hard drives to store 80TB of Blu-ray backups and Steam games.

This is likely a niche within a niche within a niche, but who cares? It's awesome. :)Reply

4-way SLI implies you'll get at least four mechanically x16 PCI-E slots. In fact, the previous version of this board (the X79 chipset) had seven x16 slots (it used some bridge chips). Fill those slots with LSI 9201-16i cards and the Extreme 11 ends up with 134 SATA ports.

I'm not sure why you'd want that many ports in a single consumer machine (I wouldn't trust a 134 drive RAID setup without ECC RAM), but you *could*, and that's pointlessly awesome.Reply

Unfortunately, there are a few "enterprise" features that you really really want before you put that many drives in a single machine. ECC being one of them. You can handle a lot at the software layer with something like ZFS, but even ZFS won't help against memory corruption.Reply

Because you can never have enough SATA ports. The article did say it's SATA/SAS, I believe SAS can be daisy chain, but it only possible through a SAS expander port. The SAS on this board is only 1 device per port. SAS expander can connect up to 4 devices.Reply

You can use reverse breakout cables and take SAS ports 0-3 to a single SFF-8087 connector and plug it into an expander or route to an external HBA for a DAS hookup.I used to do this with my ASUS Z8NA-D6 and an HP Expander.Reply

This would require 16 GB unbuffered memory which have yet to be released in any sort of volume. Haswell supports it if they ever do appear on store shelves. Right now it is best you can get on this board is 32 GB.Reply

"But the peak speeds showcased by ASRock were half this value at 5.5 gigabytes per second, suggesting that these LSI ports may be SATA 3 Gbps limited." I dont think this is accurate..if you go back and look at the IOMeter Screenshot it is showing IOPS, not Throughput. Reply